Comanche 4

Chopper

BOOM!

While most flight sims aim for an almost excessive degree of
realism, manuals that put War & Peace to shame and controls
that require several hours of real life pilot training to master,
Comanche 4 is a very different beast. Designed to appeal to the
Quake generation, it's all about pick up and play action rather
than detailed flight models.
A brief tutorial mission should make even the most inexperienced of
PC pilots feel at home with the advanced RAH-66 Comanche
helicopter, and then it's time to head off to war. Suitably enough
this is a new kind of war you are facing, with heavily armed
terrorists the target in most missions rather than hostile nations.
In all there are six campaigns, which you can play in any order,
and should you get stuck on one mission you can simply switch to a
different campaign and come back when you're feeling more
confident.
Settings range from the Balkans and Belarus to the Libyan border
and tropical islands, with everything from deserts and jungles to
snow-covered forests and debris-strewn city streets to explore. The
one thing that these locations have in common is that they all look
absolutely stunning. Doing away with the voxels of yore,
Novalogic's new polygonal graphics engine still produces extensive
and highly detailed terrain while taking full advantage of modern
hardware.

Sweet, Sweet Candy

All I need now is Ride Of The Valkyries blaring out of my speakers at several hundred decibels...

The result is eye-catching and the sheer attention to detail is
impressive. The wash from your rotors stirs up dust as you hover
low over the ground, oil tanks explode in huge rolling tongues of
flame, buildings gracefully collapse in on themselves in a cloud of
smoke and shattered glass, and ships slowly keel over and sink as
your missiles strike them.
Moreover, for the first time in the Comanche series you really feel
as though you are in the middle of a full scale war. Enemy
helicopters and fighter jets fly overhead while jeeps, tanks,
trucks, anti-aircraft vehicles, infantry, icemobiles and dune
buggies litter the ground. Up close during the in-game cutscenes at
the start of each mission they can look slightly blocky, and the
way the tanks glide along the ground without their tracks moving is
a little disconcerting. But in the heat of battle you won't notice
any of this, and from a distance the vehicles look every bit as
beautiful as your own intricately modelled helicopter.
Sadly all of this eye candy comes at a cost though. Even playing at
800x600 with a fast Athlon processor and GeForce 2 graphics card
the game can be rather choppy when things get frantic, and that's
with the default settings the game recommended for my hardware. If
you lift your helicopter too high into the air during a large
battle the whole thing can grind to a halt, rendering literally one
frame every second. There are plenty of options available to reduce
the detail of the graphics to improve your frame rate, but we would
recommend taking the minimum system requirements on the box with a
recommended daily allowance sized pinch of salt. The bottom line is
that while Comanche 4 still looks attractive on lesser systems, if
you want to see the game in all its glory you really need a GeForce
3 graphics card.

Frustration

Mission Impossible

Luckily most of the time you will be hugging the ground, making
things relatively easy for the graphics engine while maintaining a
low radar profile. Comanche 4 might be an action game at heart, but
it also has a healthy dose of stealth, and you will sometimes need
to take advantage of the terrain to avoid detection and complete
your sortie intact.
Missions often boil down to "follow the waypoints and shoot the red
dots on your radar display", but there is enough variety to keep
things interesting. You may be called upon to infiltrate Russian
airspace and destroy a missile silo before terrorists can launch an
attack, to clear the way for engineers to recover a downed
satellite before the local army can get to it, or to take out the
anti-aircraft turrets and radar systems on a pair of destroyers to
open the way for an air strike on a naval flotilla. Frequently you
will be called upon to work in co-operation with allied ground or
air forces, with some campaigns seconding you to the CIA or Delta
Force to fly air support for their covert missions around the
world.
The bad news is that a few of these missions are incredibly
difficult, and there is no in-game save function. Combine this with
the fact that a quick burst of machinegun fire followed by a direct
hit from a ground-to-air missile is enough to scatter your flaming
wreckage across the landscape, and you can imagine that things get
rather frustrating at times. There is nothing worse than
triumphantly taking on the entire Libyan army, only for your team
mate to fly into you from behind or a lone enemy soldier to knock
you out of the sky with a shoulder-fired missile as you close in on
your final target.

Tree Hugger

Time for a little hide and seek

This is made more irritating by the occasional targeting problems
which the game suffers from. For obvious reasons you lose your lock
on a target when you lose your line of sight to it, but this often
happens even when you can still quite clearly see your target and
it's only obscured by a few branches of a tree or the corner of a
ruined building.
Luckily you can still take out a partially hidden anti-aircraft gun
with your cannon by aiming it manually, but in the heat of battle
this is easier said than done. It also makes using Hellfire
missiles far more difficult than it perhaps should be, as you must
maintain a target lock for as long as the missiles are in flight.
Unless you're out at sea or in the middle of a desert this is
harder than it sounds, especially if you are trying to dodge
incoming fire at the time. And if at any point your target
disappears behind a tree and you can't regain your lock quickly
enough, your missile will fly off out of control and miss
completely.
The enemy AI doesn't seem to quite understand trees either, and
sometimes you will catch your foe trying to fire ground-to-air
rockets through foliage, only for the missile to blow up in its
face as it strikes a stray twig. Otherwise the AI does a reasonable
job, although the focus seems to be more on numbers than brains
when it comes to enemy forces. It's not unusual to find yourself
going up against dozens of hostile troops single-handed, which can
be highly satisfying, if not particularly realistic. Ammunition is
often in short supply, but you can always return to base or find a
forward resupply post to restock and repair at. Again, this isn't
particularly realistic (your 'copter is restored to full ammo and
health the second you touch down), but it does make some of the
tougher missions that little bit more manageable.

Conclusions

Comanche 4 is essentially a first person shooter in the skies, best
played with a mouse and keyboard, and as such it's not likely to
appeal to hardcore flight sim fanatics. For action fans though it
can be highly entertaining, particularly when taken in short doses.
Disappointingly the Novaworld online support still isn't
working, but given the variety and difficulty of the single player
missions on offer there should be enough here to keep you busy for
at least a couple of weeks, and if you run out of things to kill
you can always set up some new scenarios with the mission editor.